# 7 OF 12 - THIS UNHAPPY BOOK REPORT ON "THE POLITICAL POPE"

# 7 OF 12 - THIS UNHAPPY BOOK REPORT ON "THE POLITICAL POPE"

IN PURSUIT OF THE TRUTH - HTTP://WWW/CINOPSBEGONEBLOGSPOT.COM - Sun. July 6/18

    This is the seventh of excerpts from the book by George Neumayer titled, "The Political Pope" 33-40

    "Conservative Catholic commentators in Latin America, whose voices were drowned out in the din of praise following Bergoglio's election, had warned that his pontificate would prove disastrous. To these observers familiar with his tenure in Buenos Aires, the maddening incoherence and people-pleasing relativism of his pontificate were all too predictable. "Off all the unthinkable candidates, Jorge Mario Bergoglio is perhaps the worst," wrote Marcelo Gonzalez. "This election is incomprehensible: he is not a polyglot, he has no curial experience, he does not shine for his sanctity. he is loose in doctrine and liturgy, he has not fought against abortion and only very weekly against homosexual 'marriage' [approved with practically no opposition from the episcopate], he has no manners to honor the Pontifical Throne. He has never fought for anything else than to remain in positions of power....

    As even his sympathetic biographer Paul Vallely acknowledged Pope Francis has a weakness for contrived acts of humility. On his first first papal trip, for example, he rebuked an aide for putting his brief-case on the plane, thus depriving him of the opportunity to look modest. He instructed the aide to retrieve the briefcase so that he could be seen carrying it, wrote Vallely....

Obama's Pope:

    But it was the politically correct third-worldism of the first Latin American pope that Obama found most exciting. When Obama learned that Pope Francis planned to canonize the slain left-wing archbishop Oscar Romero, a movement had stalled under Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, he immediately issued a statement: "I am grateful to Pope Francis for his leadership in reminding us of our obligation to help those most in need, and for his decision to beatify Blessed Oscar Arnulf Romero.

Obama also appreciated that Pope Francis was giving greater attention to left-wing politics than to theology, thereby making it easier for the left to shape politics and culture without religious resistance.

    The "healing mission of the church" was Time's euphemism for Pope Francis identification with global socialism.... The media insisted on portraying Pope Francis as the "people's pontiff." But to conservative Catholics, these laurels from the media only proved his status as the elite's pontiff....

Timothy Egan, a New York Times columnist who describes himself as "lapsed but listening," also summed up Francis appeal for his secular readers concisely: "He is - gasp - a liberal." At long last, a progressive occupies the chair of St. Peter, exulted Egan: "Pope Francis has shown himself to be a free spirit and a free thinker .... He talks to atheists ... He calls for the faithful to 'mess up the church'....Francis has befuddled the guardians of dogma and medieval sexual doctrines who have long kept sunlight out of the Vatican.' ....

    Even in his homeland of Argentina, support for Pope Francis is beginning to wane. In 2016, reported the New York Post, "a recent poll revealed that Francis - the former Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop

of Buenos Aires - has tumbled from first to the ninth most 'trustworthy Argentine' in two years.... Pope Francis call the Church on his watch a "field hospital." But if it is one, many of the patients appear to be dying. Pews in many dioceses remain as empty as ever. As one wan headline put it in 2013, "Pope Francis' Appeal Not Measurable Yet in Church Attendance."

    Pope Benedict XVI said the crisis in the Church deepened after it followed the liberal zeitgeist. But Pope Francis rejects that view, pushing "reforms" rooted in following the liberal zeitgeist even more slavishly. "We are not living an era of changed but a change of era," Pope Francis has said, aligning  himself with the Church's critics. "Before the problem of the church it is not useful to search for solutions in conservatism or fundamentalism, in the restoration of obsolete conduct and forms that no longer have the capacity of being significant culturally .... Christian doctrine is not a closed system incapable of generating questions, doubts, interrogatives - but is alive, knows being unsettled, enlivened." .... To liberals, this signifies a "springtime in the Church. To conservative Catholics, reeling from four years of chaos and confusion, it feels more like the dead of winter....  George H. Kubeck